The Evolution of Enterprise Software

The San Francisco-based company is shooting for "'always on' availability" for the cloud-based service, meaning reduced downtimes (or hopefully, none at all) during periods of heavy traffic and/or disasters.

DocuSign plans to do this with a new architecture that rest heavily upon more datacenters saving transaction data and then syncing that among several geographical locations.

Another upgrade intended to streamline the customer experience is a refreshed user interface along with a new security appliance for managing document encryption keys within a company's own datacenters.

Introduced first on Wednesday, the the DocuSign Security Appliance is targeted toward healthcare, government, and financial services customers looking to use digital transaction management while satisfying industry certifications and protocols.

DocuSign's Spring 2014 release will be launching next week.

Existing paid DocuSign users (i.e. individual, enterprise, Real Estate etc.) can elect to start using the new interface as soon as March 12. Free users will be rolled over gradually starting the same day through August 31.

Many of these upgrades have been made possible thanks to a recent round of fundraising, which raked in approximately $85 million from nearly a dozen different sources, including Google Ventures, SAP Ventures, and Salesforce.com. Morgan Stanley acted as the sole placement agent.

Rachel King is a staff writer for CBS Interactive based in San Francisco, covering business and enterprise technology for ZDNet, CNET and SmartPlanet.
She has previously worked for The Business Insider, FastCompany.com, CNN's San Francisco bureau and the U.S. Department of State. Rachel has also written for MainStreet.com, Irish Americ...
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